Special SPH Research Seminar

Safe Consumption Sites and Other Harm Reduction Strategies for the Opioid Epidemic

This seminar will be led by Dr. Susan Sherman from Johns Hopkins School of Public Health.

The opioid epidemic is one of the most challenging public health issues of our times. It is the result if a confluence of seemingly disparate factors such as pharmaceutical company marketing, physician prescribing patterns, a turf war in distribution between Mexico and Columbia, and depressed microeconomies throughout the U.S. The CDC’s provisional 2017 data estimates that 73,000 people died of a drug overdose, a rise in 13% over the previous 12 months. It is estimated that 68% of those deaths involved at least one opioid. An escalating contributor to rising opioid overdose rates are synthetic opioids such as fentanyl, which is 50-100 more potent than morphine. Solutions are needed to match the current nature of the opioid epidemic, which include several evidence-based harm reduction interventions. There are over 115 safe consumption spaces world-wide with a strong body of evidence supporting their positive impacts on health and economic viability. Drug checking, widespread throughout Europe, has emerged in a number of US settings as a harm reduction method to provide information to people who use drugs about the presence of fentanyl in their drugs. Implementing such evidence-based, innovative programming is necessary to reduce the burden of fatal and nonfatal overdoses which has become endemic in many jurisdictions across the U.S.

She will be joined by Dr. Dennis McCarty, Professor Emeritus at the OHSU-PSU School of Public Health and Dwight Holton, former US Attorney and CEO of Lines for Life, Haven Wheelock, Harm Reduction Advocate and Johns Hopkins Bloomberg Fellow and Deputy Chief Robert Day from the Portland Police Bureau.